Friday, 17 February 2017

Pink Triangle: Introduction

This book seeks to throw some light in a
corner of modern history that has thus far remained too much in the shadows:
the persecution of homosexuals under the Third Reich. Even today, four decades
after Hitler’s defeat, many facets of the Nazi regime have not received full
popular and scholarly attention; they have been crowded out, so to speak, by
the horror of the major atrocity, the extermination of the Jews. The attempted
systematic destruction of other, numerically smaller groups also caught in the
maw of the Nazi terror, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Gypsies, antifascists
of all shades, and nonconforming clergymen can only be presented marginally in
this study. Fuller presentation must be consulted elsewhere, or, in many cases,
left to future researchers.

The period directly following the collapse
of Hitler’s Germany offered much immediate relief for most of the regime’s
persecuted victims, in addition to giving them a platform to air to the world
their undeniable grievances- but not so for the gays. For one thing, the
climate of the Cold War and the conservative moralism of the Adenauer
administration was not conducive to eliminating all traces of Nazi
jurisprudence, not including the 1935 antihomosexual laws, which remained in
effect until 1969. For another, the nature of their “crimes” was so intimate
that very few wished to publicise such a sexual preference or life style.
Finally- and perhaps most curious of all- the morality rate for homosexuals
incarcerated by the Nazis was, it appears, relatively higher, in the camps and
after their release, than that of other persecuted groups. Rea=searchers
learned that the gays, marked by pink triangles, were a relatively small
minority in the camps but had a proportionately higher mortality rate than, for
example, the more numerous political prisoners, who wore red patches. As with
all those who survived the jails, forced labour camps, and death camps, a large
number died shortly afterward. Of those gays with whom researchers were able to
make contact in the 1960s and 1970s, an unusually high number died before
initial interviews, and many did not live to complete correspondences or
accounts of their personal histories.

Thus it is no accident that the first full
length report by a gay ex-inmate, Heinz Heger’s The Men with the Pink Triangle, appeared late, in 1972, followed in
1977 by the now classic investigative report, Homosexuality and Society, conducted by a team led by Rudiger
Lautmann of Bremen University. This work offered the first truly reliable
statistics on the persecution, arrest, imprisonment, and fate of German and
Austrian homosexuals in various concentration camps. Although a few historians,
notably Eugen Kogon in his pioneering Der
SS Staat (1946), had called attention to the existence of gay inmates in
various camps, especially Buchenwald, it remained for Lautmann and his
associates to make known to a larger public the results of his definitive study
carried out in part in the vast archives of the International Tracing Service
at Arolsen, West Germany.

In 1980, Heger’s memoirs were translated
and published in the United States and Britain. Unfortunately, they were
generally ignored. On the other hand, Martin Sherman’s play Bent (1979), which based some of its
plot on material in Heger’s book, was widely discussed. Bent opened the forbidden closet a crack and put the world on
notice that indeed the Nazis had hounded all contragenics[1],
that gays had been classified with criminals, asocials, and Jews as deviant
subhumans, the cosmic lice that Hitler and Himmler had vowed to exterminate.

One might be tempted to conclude that
before the late 1970s writers interested in tracing the Nazi persecution of
homosexuals had little source material to draw upon. But this temptation must
be resisted. For historians able to read german there was ample evidence
available to prove that Himmler’s storm troopers were as eager to get rid of
the gays as they were to expunge other contragenics. In fact, even for those
who could read no German there was sufficient amount of statistical material
and documentation on the subject- if they had wanted to focus on it.

For a long time German historians also
failed to discuss the plight of the gays during the Third Reich. Quite to the
contrary, a few writers such as Konrad Heiden, with a sort of coy horror,
offered hints that Hitler himself might have been a homosexual or at least some
kind of sexual deviant. The technique of homosexualising the enemy, employed by
some émigré authors, can be understood as a thirst for revenge, but it does not
excuse such gleeful illogic – they simultaneously depict Hitler as wickedly
effeminate but stop short of proving that he was homosexual. What they did was
to indict him by association. Because SA chief Ernst Roehm was admittedly an
active homosexual, these writers concluded that the dictator himself and all of
his top henchmen must have shared Roehm’s inclinations. Luchino Visconti’s
cinematic fantasy The Damned (1969)
was among the worst offenders in this regard. The movie featured a number of
senior storm troopers in drag, thus popularising the image of a homosexual Nazi
elite. More tendentiously, the film promoted the theory, believed by many
intellectuals, that the incomprehensible Nazi crimes could be easily explained;
the Nazis were simply homosexual perverts. (The tenacity of this view is
exemplified by Bernardo Bertolucci’s The
Conformist [1971], based on the 1951 novel of the same name by Alberto
Moravia.) Nor was this theory new in the post war period. A Soviet film made in
1936 stressed the same point. Gustav von Wangenheim’s The Fighters purported to tell the true story of the 1933 burning
of the Reichstag. It depicted the Nazis as homosexuals- the official Communist
Party line about the German Fascists. Soviet officials quietly shelved the film
in 1939 after Hitler and Stalin signed the nonaggression pact. The film has
never been publicly seen in the West.

But this theory offers no explanation of
why writers and historians have never fully addressed themselves to the Nazi’s
apparent homophobia- a fear that early on considered the gays as subhumans to
be weeded out, root and branch, as Himmler put it. Take, for example, an
avowedly conservative biographer, Joachim Fest. In his excellent study of
Hitler and his courtiers, Fest omitted a critical historical incident. On May 6th,
1933, a gang of “outraged students” stormed the famous Institute for Sexual
Research, directed by Magnus Hirschfeld, the father of the new science of
sexology. For three decades Hirschfeld and his team of legal and medical
associates had assembled an invaluable collection of documents, photographs and
statistics about sex. For the Nazis, Hirschfeld- a Jewish physician, a
homosexual, and a liberal propagandist- was an ideal target. The Fascist press
had denounced him with lavish insults for many years. The eager fascist
students rummaged through the building, throwing books, photos, paintings, and
files into the yard: around the growing fire they sang patriotic songs about
Germany’s awakening. Four days later they returned and put the ransacked
building to the flame, and with it the bust of their patron-Satan, Dr
Hirschfeld. Out of the country on a lecture tour, Hirschfeld never returned to
Germany. He died in France in 1935.

Fest mentions Hirschfeld’s name only once,
in passing, in his 764-page study of Hitler. In an earlier study, the shorter The Face of the Third Reich, Fest does
justice to Roehm and his execution, but in neither work are Hirschfeld, his
institute, or his writings and priceless research ever discussed.

The same omission can be found in nearly
all major histories of the Third Reich; this holds true for the work of
journalists, too. Consider William Shirer, the one reporter who, through his
radio broadcasts and writings, presented the most penetrating image of Nazi
Germany to the American public before, during, and after the war. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959),
Shirer paints a picture of Germany in the 1930s that dominated American
understanding of the Nazi regime for many years. Shirer’s observations and
perceptions of the destructive power of the political volcano whose eruptions
he witnessed show a clear appreciation of events and personalities. Yet in none
of his major works dealing with the Third Reich does Shirer call attention to
Hirschfeld’s pioneering studies, the early German gay rights movement, or the
subsequent Nazi crusade against the gays. Shirer’s sins of omission are matched
by sins of commission. In discussing Hitler’s indifference to criminals on his
staff, Shirer notes: “No matter how murky their past or indeed their present…
Murderers, pimps, homosexuals, perverts or just plain rowdies were all the same
to [Hitler] if they served their purpose.” In The NightmareYears, his
published diaries for 1930-1940, Shirer is honest enough to admit how naïve he
had been in accepting his assignment in Germany, how he had closed his eyes to
the truth because it was too painful. Although the diaries cover the year 1933,
when the incineration of the Institute for Sexual Research made headlines in
the fascist press, Shirer ignores the incident. Further, while he reports in
detail the intrigues leading to the purge of Roehm and his followers on June 28th,
1934, he has no space to spare for the new antihomosexual laws published
pointedly a year later on June 28, 1935.

It would be unjust to single out Shirer,
who alerted Americans to the true threat of the swastika revolution. Yet while
putting together his compendious 1959 study, he could easily have consulted two
volumes written not by concentration camp survivors or gay propagandists, but
rather by someone clearly involved. Rudolf Hoess, a high Nazi official, in his Kommandant in Auschwitz (1959),
elaborately recounted how he attempted to “re-educate”decadent homosexuals by
assigning them to the toughest work details and by forcing them to visit female
prostitutes. Also available in the 1950s were the indispensable reminiscences
of Himmler’s private physician, translated into English as The Memoirs of Dr Felix Kersten (1957). In his work there is an
entire chapter devoted to Himmler’s obsession with eliminating the gays. There
is simply no excuse for the widespread silence on what was clearly an important
aspect of Nazi ideology and action. Only Erich Fromm seems to have understood
the importance of the subject. Although he did not make use of the Hoess and
Kersten books, Fromm pointed out in The
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness that for an understanding of the
homophobic strain in Germany, we must reach back to the mid-nineteenth-century
homosexual emancipation movement that flourished at the same time that various
strains ofxenophobia developed, mixing
in their wake in the German consciousness a hatred of racial and sexual
minorities such as Jews and homosexuals, along with a yearning for some
charismatic figure to lead the “real” German people to victory over the
problems and crises caused by these insidious threats.

One can only conclude that, for most
historians, there was and still is a taboo in effect. The territory of gay
history is strewn with such taboos. This book seeks to end the silence toward
the fate of homosexuals under the Third Reich. That their story is an integral
part of German history will, I trust, be only too evident.

[1]Contragenics is a term
the linguist Richard J. Deppe has coined to encompass all those groups the Nazi
regime resolved to eliminate; Jews, antifascists, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
nonconforming clergymen, Gypsies, etc.